Jerry Garcia, leader of The Grateful Dead, the ultimate San Francisco hippie band, was found dead yesterday in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre.

The whiskery 53-year-old guitarist, who had a central place in the Haight Ashbury counter-culture of the 1960s, had suffered from diabetes for the past nine years.

Four years ago he stopped smoking, added a fitness trainer to the Dead's road crew and slimmed down from 15st to 12st to continue a touring schedule as punishing as some of the band's soloing.

The styles of the Dead, who formed 30 years ago, ranged from the extended improvisation featured on double live albums such as Dark Star to the more poignant shaky country-rock of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty.

But it was for their work on stage that the band were renowned. In 1984, when Born In The USA made Bruce Springsteen the biggest rock act in the world, it was still the Dead, without a new record in years, who made most money from concerts.

The Dead and their most ardent supporters - Deadheads who travelled continents to see them - exchanged a unique devotion.

While others went along with the music industry's determination to combat illegal concert recordings, the Dead set aside an area in front of stage for the bootleggers to capture their shows, which ran for at least three hours.

The band, which became a motif for an alternative lifestyle, acquired a strange mainstream acceptance over the years, the object of sad derision in Don Henley's song Boys Of Summer which refers to 'a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac'.

Eric Clapton told an executive from Goldman Sachs investment bank on a flight from New York to London last year that Garcia was the greatest guitarist in popular music.

Garcia became a one-man consumer culture, lending his name to a brand of ice cream, Cherry Garcia, and reinvented himself as a designer. More than a million Jerry Garcia neckties have been sold in the United States, a Beverly Hills hotel suite was reshaped by the guitarist and he had a range of sports shirts, cummerbunds and wool rugs from Nepal.

The Dead's following embraced 18-year-olds who trailed them around America and Gus O'Donnell, once John Major's spokesman and now deputy director of macroeconomic policy at the Treasury.

Garcia died at Serenity Knolls, a clinic in Forest Knolls, California, apparently of natural causes, according to San Francisco police.